Placeholders in the English Interlanguage of Bilingual (Basque/Spanish) Children

In this article we provide an explanation for 2 syntactic phenomena whose systematic production has been observed in the English nonnative grammar of 3 different age groups of 58 bilingual (Basque/Spanish) children after 4 years of exposure to English in a formal setting: (a) insertion of is before a lexical verb and (b) insertion of a subject personal pronoun before a lexical verb. We argue that the presence of these phenomena could be explained assuming the transfer of a functional projection common to the participants’ first languages and a gradual incorporation of the second language lexical items involved.